OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Dynamic Logic for Verification of Synchronous Models based on Theorem Proving
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Synchronous model is a type of formal models for modelling and specifying reactive systems. It has a great advantage over other real-time models that its modelling paradigm supports a deterministic concurrent behaviour of systems. Various approaches have been utilized for verification of synchronous models based on different techniques, such as model checking, SAT/SMT sovling, term rewriting, type inference and so on. In this paper, we propose a verification approach for synchronous models based on compositional reasoning and term rewriting. Specifically, we initially propose a variation of dynamic logic, called synchronous dynamic logic (SDL). SDL extends the regular program model of first-order dynamic logic (FODL) with necessary primitives to capture the notion of synchrony and synchronous communication between parallel programs, and enriches FODL formulas with temporal dynamic logical formulas to specify safety properties -- a type of properties mainly concerned in reactive systems. To rightly capture the synchronous communications, we define a constructive semantics for the program model of SDL. We build a sound and relatively complete proof system for SDL. Compared to previous verification approaches, SDL provides a divide and conquer way to analyze and verify synchronous models based on compositional reasoning of the syntactic structure of the programs of SDL. To illustrate the usefulness of SDL, we apply SDL to specify and verify a small example in the synchronous model SyncChart, which shows the potential of SDL to be used in practice.
A Bayesian Approach to Reinforcement Learning of Vision-Based Vehicular Control
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method for autonomous driving. Our approach employs temporal difference learning in a Bayesian framework to learn vehicle control signals from sensor data. The agent has access to images from a forward facing camera, which are preprocessed to generate semantic segmentation maps. We trained our system using both ground truth and estimated semantic segmentation input. Based on our observations from a large set of experiments, we conclude that training the system on ground truth input data leads to better performance than training the system on estimated input even if estimated input is used for evaluation. The system is trained and evaluated in a realistic simulated urban environment using the CARLA simulator. The simulator also contains a benchmark that allows for comparing to other systems and methods. The required training time of the system is shown to be lower and the performance on the benchmark superior to competing approaches.
On The Gap Between Software Maintenance Theory and Practitioners' Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The way practitioners perform maintenance tasks in practice is little known by researchers. In turn, practitioners are not always up to date with the proposals provided by the research community. This work investigates the gap between software maintenance techniques proposed by the research community and the software maintenance practice. We carried out a survey with 112 practitioners from 92 companies and 12 countries. We concentrate on analyzing if and how practitioners understand and apply the following subjects: bad smells, refactoring, software metrics, and change impact analysis. This study shows that there is a large gap between research approaches and industry practice in those subjects, especially in change impact analysis and software metrics.
Towards End-to-End Neural Face Authentication in the Wild -- Quantifying and Compensating for Directional Lighting Effects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The recent availability of low-power neural accelerator hardware, combined with improvements in end-to-end neural facial recognition algorithms provides, enabling technology for on-device facial authentication. The present research work examines the effects of directional lighting on a State-of-Art(SoA) neural face recognizer. A synthetic re-lighting technique is used to augment data samples due to the lack of public data-sets with sufficient directional lighting variations. Top lighting and its variants (top-left, top-right) are found to have minimal effect on accuracy, while bottom-left or bottom-right directional lighting has the most pronounced effects. Following the fine-tuning of network weights, the face recognition model is shown to achieve close to the original Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (ROC)performance across all lighting conditions and demonstrates an ability to generalize beyond the lighting augmentations used in the fine-tuning data-set. This work shows that an SoA neural face recognition model can be tuned to compensate for directional lighting effects, removing the need for a pre-processing step before applying facial recognition.
Massive Access in Media Modulation Based Massive Machine-Type Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The massive machine-type communications (mMTC) paradigm based on media modulation in conjunction with massive MIMO base stations (BSs) is emerging as a viable solution to support the massive connectivity for the future Internet-of-Things, in which the inherent massive access at the BSs poses significant challenges for device activity and data detection (DADD). This paper considers the DADD problem for both uncoded and coded media modulation based mMTC with a slotted access frame structure, where the device activity remains unchanged within one frame. Specifically, due to the slotted access frame structure and the adopted media modulated symbols, the access signals exhibit a doubly structured sparsity in both the time domain and the modulation domain. Inspired by this, a doubly structured approximate message passing (DS-AMP) algorithm is proposed for reliable DADD in the uncoded case. Also, we derive the state evolution of the DS-AMP algorithm to theoretically characterize its performance. As for the coded case, we develop a bit-interleaved coded media modulation scheme and propose an iterative DS-AMP (IDS-AMP) algorithm based on successive inference cancellation (SIC), where the signal components associated with the detected active devices are successively subtracted to improve the data decoding performance. In addition, the channel estimation problem for media modulation based mMTC is discussed and an efficient data-aided channel state information (CSI) update strategy is developed to reduce the training overhead in block fading channels. Finally, simulation results and computational complexity analysis verify the superiority of the proposed algorithms in both uncoded and coded cases. Also, our results verify the validity of the proposed data-aided CSI update strategy.
SerumRNN: Step by Step Audio VST Effect Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Learning to program an audio production VST synthesizer is a time consuming process, usually obtained through inefficient trial and error and only mastered after years of experience. As an educational and creative tool for sound designers, we propose SerumRNN: a system that provides step-by-step instructions for applying audio effects to change a user's input audio towards a desired sound. We apply our system to Xfer Records Serum: currently one of the most popular and complex VST synthesizers used by the audio production community. Our results indicate that SerumRNN is consistently able to provide useful feedback for a variety of different audio effects and synthesizer presets. We demonstrate the benefits of using an iterative system and show that SerumRNN learns to prioritize effects and can discover more efficient effect order sequences than a variety of baselines.
Permutation Encoding for Text Steganography: A Short Tutorial
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

We explore a method of encoding secret messages using factoradic numbering of permuted lists of text or numeric elements. Encoding and decoding methods are provided, with code, and key aspects of the correctness of the methods are formally proven. The method of encoding is simple and provides a working example of using textual and numeric lists as a stenagographic channel. Given the ubiquity of lists, such channels are already present but are often unused.
An Information-Theoretic Proof of a Finite de Finetti Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A finite form of de Finetti's representation theorem is established using elementary information-theoretic tools: The distribution of the first $k$ random variables in an exchangeable binary vector of length $n\geq k$ is close to a mixture of product distributions. Closeness is measured in terms of the relative entropy and an explicit bound is provided.
Machine Learning Based on Natural Language Processing to Detect Cardiac Failure in Clinical Narratives
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The purpose of the study presented herein is to develop a machine learning algorithm based on natural language processing that automatically detects whether a patient has a cardiac failure or a healthy condition by using physician notes in Research Data Warehouse at CHU Sainte Justine Hospital. First, a word representation learning technique was employed by using bag-of-word (BoW), term frequency inverse document frequency (TFIDF), and neural word embeddings (word2vec). Each representation technique aims to retain the words semantic and syntactic analysis in critical care data. It helps to enrich the mutual information for the word representation and leads to an advantage for further appropriate analysis steps. Second, a machine learning classifier was used to detect the patients condition for either cardiac failure or stable patient through the created word representation vector space from the previous step. This machine learning approach is based on a supervised binary classification algorithm, including logistic regression (LR), Gaussian Naive-Bayes (GaussianNB), and multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN). Technically, it mainly optimizes the empirical loss during training the classifiers. As a result, an automatic learning algorithm would be accomplished to draw a high classification performance, including accuracy (acc), precision (pre), recall (rec), and F1 score (f1). The results show that the combination of TFIDF and MLPNN always outperformed other combinations with all overall performance. In the case without any feature selection, the proposed framework yielded an overall classification performance with acc, pre, rec, and f1 of 84% and 82%, 85%, and 83%, respectively. Significantly, if the feature selection was well applied, the overall performance would finally improve up to 4% for each evaluation.
OGGN: A Novel Generalized Oracle Guided Generative Architecture for Modelling Inverse Function of Artificial Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a novel Generative Neural Network Architecture for modelling the inverse function of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) either completely or partially. Modelling the complete inverse function of an ANN involves generating the values of all features that corresponds to a desired output. On the other hand, partially modelling the inverse function means generating the values of a subset of features and fixing the remaining feature values. The feature set generation is a critical step for artificial neural networks, useful in several practical applications in engineering and science. The proposed Oracle Guided Generative Neural Network, dubbed as OGGN, is flexible to handle a variety of feature generation problems. In general, an ANN is able to predict the target values based on given feature vectors. The OGGN architecture enables to generate feature vectors given the predetermined target values of an ANN. When generated feature vectors are fed to the forward ANN, the target value predicted by ANN will be close to the predetermined target values. Therefore, the OGGN architecture is able to map, inverse function of the function represented by forward ANN. Besides, there is another important contribution of this work. This paper also introduces a new class of functions, defined as constraint functions. The constraint functions enable a neural network to investigate a given local space for a longer period of time. Thus, enabling to find a local optimum of the loss function apart from just being able to find the global optimum. OGGN can also be adapted to solve a system of polynomial equations in many variables. The experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of OGGN on various use cases.
On Telecommunication Service Imbalance and Infrastructure Resource Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

The digital divide restricting the access of people living in developing areas to the benefits of modern information and communications technologies has become a major challenge and research focus. To well understand and finally bridge the digital divide, we first need to discover a proper measure to characterize and quantify the telecommunication service imbalance. In this regard, we propose a fine-grained and easy-to-compute imbalance index, aiming to quantitatively link the relation among telecommunication service imbalance, telecommunication infrastructure, and demographic distribution. The mathematically elegant and generic form of the imbalance index allows consistent analyses for heterogeneous scenarios and can be easily tailored to incorporate different telecommunication policies and application scenarios. Based on this index, we also propose an infrastructure resource deployment strategy by minimizing the average imbalance index of any geographical segment. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed imbalance index by showing a high degree of correlation to existing congeneric but coarse-grained measures and the superiority of the infrastructure resource deployment strategy.
Just Label What You Need: Fine-Grained Active Selection for Perception and Prediction through Partially Labeled Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Self-driving vehicles must perceive and predict the future positions of nearby actors in order to avoid collisions and drive safely. A learned deep learning module is often responsible for this task, requiring large-scale, high-quality training datasets. As data collection is often significantly cheaper than labeling in this domain, the decision of which subset of examples to label can have a profound impact on model performance. Active learning techniques, which leverage the state of the current model to iteratively select examples for labeling, offer a promising solution to this problem. However, despite the appeal of this approach, there has been little scientific analysis of active learning approaches for the perception and prediction (P&P) problem. In this work, we study active learning techniques for P&P and find that the traditional active learning formulation is ill-suited for the P&P setting. We thus introduce generalizations that ensure that our approach is both cost-aware and allows for fine-grained selection of examples through partially labeled scenes. Our experiments on a real-world, large-scale self-driving dataset suggest that fine-grained selection can improve the performance across perception, prediction, and downstream planning tasks.
Panoptic Segmentation Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Our goal is to forecast the near future given a set of recent observations. We think this ability to forecast, i.e., to anticipate, is integral for the success of autonomous agents which need not only passively analyze an observation but also must react to it in real-time. Importantly, accurate forecasting hinges upon the chosen scene decomposition. We think that superior forecasting can be achieved by decomposing a dynamic scene into individual 'things' and background 'stuff'. Background 'stuff' largely moves because of camera motion, while foreground 'things' move because of both camera and individual object motion. Following this decomposition, we introduce panoptic segmentation forecasting. Panoptic segmentation forecasting opens up a middle-ground between existing extremes, which either forecast instance trajectories or predict the appearance of future image frames. To address this task we develop a two-component model: one component learns the dynamics of the background stuff by anticipating odometry, the other one anticipates the dynamics of detected things. We establish a leaderboard for this novel task, and validate a state-of-the-art model that outperforms available baselines.
Software/Hardware Co-design for Multi-modal Multi-task Learning in Autonomous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Optimizing the quality of result (QoR) and the quality of service (QoS) of AI-empowered autonomous systems simultaneously is very challenging. First, there are multiple input sources, e.g., multi-modal data from different sensors, requiring diverse data preprocessing, sensor fusion, and feature aggregation. Second, there are multiple tasks that require various AI models to run simultaneously, e.g., perception, localization, and control. Third, the computing and control system is heterogeneous, composed of hardware components with varied features, such as embedded CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and dedicated accelerators. Therefore, autonomous systems essentially require multi-modal multi-task (MMMT) learning which must be aware of hardware performance and implementation strategies. While MMMT learning has been attracting intensive research interests, its applications in autonomous systems are still underexplored. In this paper, we first discuss the opportunities of applying MMMT techniques in autonomous systems and then discuss the unique challenges that must be solved. In addition, we discuss the necessity and opportunities of MMMT model and hardware co-design, which is critical for autonomous systems especially with power/resource-limited or heterogeneous platforms. We formulate the MMMT model and heterogeneous hardware implementation co-design as a differentiable optimization problem, with the objective of improving the solution quality and reducing the overall power consumption and critical path latency. We advocate for further explorations of MMMT in autonomous systems and software/hardware co-design solutions.
Results and Insights from Diagnostic Questions: The NeurIPS 2020 Education Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

This competition concerns educational diagnostic questions, which are pedagogically effective, multiple-choice questions (MCQs) whose distractors embody misconceptions. With a large and ever-increasing number of such questions, it becomes overwhelming for teachers to know which questions are the best ones to use for their students. We thus seek to answer the following question: how can we use data on hundreds of millions of answers to MCQs to drive automatic personalized learning in large-scale learning scenarios where manual personalization is infeasible? Success in using MCQ data at scale helps build more intelligent, personalized learning platforms that ultimately improve the quality of education en masse. To this end, we introduce a new, large-scale, real-world dataset and formulate 4 data mining tasks on MCQs that mimic real learning scenarios and target various aspects of the above question in a competition setting at NeurIPS 2020. We report on our NeurIPS competition in which nearly 400 teams submitted approximately 4000 submissions, with encouragingly diverse and effective approaches to each of our tasks.
RLIBM-32: High Performance Correctly Rounded Math Libraries for 32-bit Floating Point Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes a set of techniques to develop correctly rounded math libraries for 32-bit float and posit types. It enhances our RLibm approach that frames the problem of generating correctly rounded libraries as a linear programming problem in the context of 16-bit types to scale to 32-bit types. Specifically, this paper proposes new algorithms to (1) generate polynomials that produce correctly rounded outputs for all inputs using counterexample guided polynomial generation, (2) generate efficient piecewise polynomials with bit-pattern based domain splitting, and (3) deduce the amount of freedom available to produce correct results when range reduction involves multiple elementary functions. The resultant math library for the 32-bit float type is faster than state-of-the-art math libraries while producing the correct output for all inputs. We have also developed a set of correctly rounded elementary functions for 32-bit posits.
Interdisciplinary Research Methodologies in Engineering Education Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

As Engineering Education Research (EER) develops as a discipline it is necessary for EER scholars to contribute to the development of learning theory rather than simply being informed by it. It has been suggested that to do this effectively will require partnerships between Engineering scholars and psychologists, education researchers, including other social scientists. The formation of such partnerships is particularly important when considering the introduction of business-related skills into engineering curriculum designed to prepare 21st Century Engineering Students for workplace challenges. In order to encourage scholars beyond Engineering to engage with EER, it is necessary to provide an introduction to the complexities of EER. With this aim in mind, this paper provides an outline review of what is considered rigorous research from an EER perspective as well as highlighting some of the core methodological traditions of EER. The paper aims to facilitate further discussion between EER scholars and researchers from other disciplines, ultimately leading to future collaboration on innovative and rigorous EER.
The Kaleidoscope of Privacy: Differences across French, German, UK, and US GDPR Media Discourse
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Conceptions of privacy differ by culture. In the Internet age, digital tools continuously challenge the way users, technologists, and governments define, value, and protect privacy. National and supranational entities attempt to regulate privacy and protect data managed online. The European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect on 25 May 2018. The research presented here draws on two years of media reporting on GDPR from French, German, UK, and US sources. We use the unsupervised machine learning method of topic modelling to compare the thematic structure of the news articles across time and geographic regions. Our work emphasises the relevance of regional differences regarding valuations of privacy and potential obstacles to the implementation of unilateral data protection regulation such as GDPR. We find that the topics and trends over time in GDPR media coverage of the four countries reflect the differences found across their traditional privacy cultures.